The Automated Clearing House (ACH) has fast become one of the most efficient ways to automate the processing of financial transactions, and is one of the most valuable and cost-effective services that a financial institution can offer to its customers. ACH is an automated “batch process” universal funds transfer system, governed by the rules of the National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA), which provides for the inter banking clearing electronic entries by participating financial institutions. Specifically, ACH processes large volumes of credit and debit transactions in batches. ACH credit transfers include direct deposit payroll, direct payment, business-to-business payments, e-checks, e-commerce payments, tax payments and the like. ACH direct debit transfers include consumer payments on insurance premiums, mortgage loans and other types of bill payments.
According to NACHA, annual electronic payment volume doubles every five years. In 2007, nearly 14 billion ACH payments were made.
Traditionally, each financial institution that participated in the ACH process provided their own proprietary processing platform. In order to create efficiencies of scale, shared ACH processing platforms have been created that allow for two or more financial institutions to leverage market-leading payment capabilities and product solutions. One such shared ACH processing platform is the Pariter Solution, formed as a Joint venture between Bank of America and Well Fargo and Company. Shared ACH processing platforms, such as Pariter or the like, combine the strengths of the participating financial institutions in advanced processing technology and high payment volume to create a more efficient platform. Additionally, shared ACH processing facilitates greater investment in innovation to deliver added value to clients through increased speed, broader product capability and capacity for higher volumes of cross-border payments.
One problem paramount to ACH processing and, specifically shared ACH processing, is the ability to monitor the process and provide real-time visibility to process owners regarding the health of their processes. For example, exception processing requires monitoring. An “exception” is the term used for an ACH item which could not post to an account for some specified reason, such as insufficient funds, account closed, lack of matching account number or the like. In another example, monitoring is necessary to determine whether a file or batch of files made it into one financial institution's transfer station and continued downstream to the shared landing zone or vice versa. Such exceptions or other events, such as failure to receive an acknowledgement of file(s) received or the like may prompt the system to generate an alarm message. Monitoring of such alarms is necessary to insure that action is taken to rectify the problem that caused the alarm. Without proper procedures and applications in place to monitor the alarms, on a real-time basis, the problems that caused the alarms can escalate adding further delays and inefficiencies to the ACH processing process.
Therefore, a need exists to develop systems, methods, computer program products and the like for monitoring events, such as events triggering alarms, in an ACH processing environment and, moreover, a shared ACH processing environment. The desired system should provide an automated approach to detecting the presence of exceptions or other events adverse to ACH processing. The automated nature of the desired system and methods provides for real-time monitoring of ACH processing, which is essential in mitigating or eliminating problems as they occur and maintaining operability of the ACH processing system.